I just discovered this thread, and have now cost my company quite a bit of time in lost productivity. (We're not real busy at the moment, so I can't define "lost" very strictly right now.)
My first exposure to creationism as an actual philosophy was while attending college in a southern state in the US in the mid-70's. I was dating a girl who dropped me without warning when I said that evolution was a proven science. She railed into me about what a heathen I was to doubt the word of God, how could I think my uncle was an ape, yada yada yada. When that mindset became apparent, my attitude changed from "WTF!?!" to "good riddance!" Nonetheless, I was flabbergasted that a modern educated human could believe something like that. Her "facts" were real to her, she had no interest in hearing otherwise. She was "backed" by the word of God, and the "teaching" of her church was all she needed.
There is no fundamental difference between the Creationists' insistence that God created the Earth over a 6-day period some thousands of years ago exactly as we see it today, and the earlier debates between religion and science over the shape of the Earth (it's FLAT, you moron, how can you say it's round, can't you see that God gave us a flat ground?), its location (since we are created in His image, the Earth is the center of all there is - no way does the Earth go around the Sun), and the moons of Jupiter (send that Galileo heretic to prison!!!! No way can a planet have little worlds of its own! It defies God to think so!) It is the same level of ignorance and closed-minded thinking. There is a basic error in the assumption by Creationists that science defies God, and they cannot grasp the notion that science itself (including evolution) is a creation (and tool) of God.
I take issue with the literal interpretation of the Bible as the word of God. I'm sorry, but nobody took dictation. The Bible is a work of literature. It contains allegory, anecdotal lessons, and parables. It also contains rules, laws, commandments. It does not define the Universe, or the origin of species, other than to say that the Earth, animals, and man were "created." The Bible was not written by God, it was written by humans inspired by God, some of whom, unfortunately, had "agendas", and whose understanding of the physical world around them was about the same as a cave man's.
There is no one alive today who can seriously argue that the Earth is the center of all the Universe and that all things move around it, yet within the past millenium you could be imprisoned for publishing anything else. These same people (who insist that evolution is the devil's own work) have no problem "defying" what was once the law of the church. They understand that the Earth goes around the Sun, and that the Sun is just another star in some remote area of a large collection of stars, which itself is remote from other such collections, yet they cannot grasp the notion of evolution as the very tool set up by God to allow for the creation of species.
Knowing the church's history with science (approximately 0 for 146 or so) I am amazed that religious groups continue to have a problem with people wanting to learn more about how stuff actually works. Learning is not heretical, knowing is not sinful, and new ideas are not in defiance of what has been taught before. The religious right continues to teach its children that its "facts" are the "true" facts, there are no other ideas to contemplate, you should not believe, or even listen to, anyone saying anything different, and the only basis you need to believe what we say is that we said it. Folks, that defines Fascism, doesn't it?
(There, that ought to get some people worked up!)